Zinaida Serebriakova: Self Portraits

A viewer like her friend in the World of Art, the painter and critic Alexandre Benois (Aleksandr Benua, 1870-1960), one of its founding fathers, recognized it as a self-portrait and discussed it as such in his review of the seventh exhibit of the Union of Russian Artists in 1910. But Serebriakova never identified it in that way, perhaps (and this is pure speculation) because she knew how radical it was. Here to be sure is the pose we can observe in hundreds of self-portraits, but the mirror is not some abstraction, but the very “real” mirror of her dressing table … It reflects the artist’s bedroom, the objects on the vanity – hairpins, perfume bottles, jewelry, makeup – and the artist herself, shoulder seductively bared, with comb, not brush, in hand. We see not the palette and brushes with which the painter “makes up” her image on the canvas, but the makeup she uses every day to present herself to the world, a clever “baring of the device” of the self-portrait, to borrow Shklovsky’s famous formulation.